Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

country girl who would take a summer job, and the woman thought I would be about the right age, and trained to do housework.” The real-life woman who had made the connection did run a store in Pointe au Baril, and she had taught at the Lower Town school; she had relatives in Wingham. In “Sunday Afternoon,” Munro creates the circumstances of the home in Forest Hill. (“There was a guy who made a pass at me in the kitchen,” she recalled, and also said, “It was time I found out” about such things.) In that story a cousin “took hold of” Alva, the maid, “lightly, and spent some time kissing her mouth.” This leaves Alva, as the story ends, with “a tender spot, a new and still mysterious humiliation.”
    But in “Hired Girl,” Munro quite precisely recreates her circumstances and a narrator who seems a close self-portrait. When the hired girl, Elsa, arrives on the island, named Nausicaä, Mrs. Montroy tells her that the name is from Shakespeare; knowing better, the narrator almost corrects her, but does not. She realizes her position. And at one point she comments, in a passage that certainly reflects Munro’s circumstances at home in Wingham at the time,
    The work that I had to do here was nothing new for me. Like most country girls of my age, I could bake and iron, and clean an oven. This was the reason, in fact, that Mrs. Montjoy had sought out a country girl. In some ways the work was not as hard as it was at home. Nobody tracked barnyard mud into the kitchen, and there were no heavy men’s clothes to wrestle through the wringer and hang on the line.
    After she’s worked there the summer, having learned much about her employers’ lives, little of it edifying, she asks Mrs. Montjoy about the circumstances of her daughter’s death, details she already well knows, just to hear the mother’s account and see her manner. Even so, “I thought myself blameless, beyond judgment, in my dealings with Mrs. Montjoy. Because I was young and poor and knew about Nausicaä. I didn’t have the grace or fortitude to be a servant.” This story ends with Munro’s recreation of herself then, in 1948, and with an affirmation of Munro’s passion for reading, for words: “Reading this, I felt as if I had been rescued from my life. Words could become a burning-glass for me in those days, and no shame of my nature or condition could hold out among the flares of pleasure.” Here Munro is remembering herself as she was during the summer of 1948, driven to read and to write, knowing just what she wanted to do.
    During these years Munro was a presence in the young lives of the Cruikshank girls, Julie and Jane, who lived across the road and for whom she babysat with some regularity. Like the Laidlaws, the Cruikshanks also lived far out on the Lower Town Road, did not really fit in to Lower Town and so were not seen as part of that place. Julie, who would have been three or four during Munro’s last years of high school, remembers Alice as “a totally exotic creature” who delighted them by telling them an ongoing serial story when she came to look after them. “I would wait with huge anticipation until my parents went out again,” she recalls. Munro would ask Julie, the older of the two sisters, where she had left off before “and then she’d pick up and carry on again … this was a kind of never-ending story,” which delighted the girls. The stories themselves, she recalls, were geared to the mind of a four-year-old, for they had princesses in them and sometimes they acted them out. (Such stories bore some resemblance, certainly, to the
Wuthering Heights
-like novel Munro was working on then.) Cruikshank, who went on to become a cultural anthropologist and a university professor, credits Munro’s stories with inspiring her own academic interest in narrative. 35

    Such considerations notwithstanding, Munro’s “real life” – the phrase she used in
Lives of Girls and Women
and, altered slightly, again in “Miles City, Montana” as “real work” – was in her imagination as she developed as a writer. In “Miles City,” the narrator speaks of her “real work” as “a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself” and that, most clearly, was what Alice Laidlaw was doing as she walked to and from school, as she walked north from her home past the Cruikshanks’ toward their abandoned house, as she “thought her thoughts.” She was always reading and making up stories, partly imagined and partly